Real-Time World

Published: GrimGrin Studio, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9559735-2-9 [hardback £16.99; pp.165]. First published by New English Library in hardcover in 1974, but that edition is long out of print. A paperback followed in 1976. Some translations are available; no US edition was ever published. The edition here was self-published by CP, mainly in answer to enquiries about the original edition. There is also a GrimGrin paperback, with two extra stories — please see the page for Real-Time World +2.

This edition includes the original Introduction, plus a new one written in 2008. Real-Time World was CP’s first short story collection, now mostly remarkable for its extreme scarcity. The title story adumbrates several of CP’s later themes in his novels, and in its day another story, “The Head and the Hand”, was frequently anthologized. With a couple of exceptions, though, the rest of the stories are early work. [Includes: 2 x Introductions. Stories: “The Head and the Hand”, “Fire Storm”, “Double Consummation”, “A Woman Naked”, “Transplant”, “Breeding Ground”, “Sentence in Binary Code”, “The Perihelion Man”, “The Run”, “Real-Time World”.]